“I—don’t know,” Hodgkins told him slowly.
“No, I suppose you don’t. The idol must be worshipped at all costs.” He lapsed into silence.
For long minutes there was no sound in the room but the curiously loud ticking of a watch somewhere in Hodgkin’s clothing. Down the corridor an elevator door clanged.
“Uh—about Carolyn.”
“Yes, we still must face the problem of your missing wife.” Nash sighed and his body relaxed. “We can safely assume we know one of the reasons why she left you. Once she learned all there was to know about your latest work, learned the type of vessel for which it was designed, your usefulness to her was nearly over. Mind you, I’m not saying that she couldn’t have continued to live with you, couldn’t have continued to pry out your trade secrets. She could have stayed. But she didn’t. That is the most important, and I want very much to know why she didn’t stay.”
“I’m very glad you understand,” Hodgkins said wearily. “I didn’t know where else to turn.”
Nash looked down on him curiously. “You want me to find her, I take it—to attempt a reconciliation?”
“Anything, Mr. Nash, just anything at all! I want to see Carolyn again, to touch her, to talk to her. I’m miserable without her and I want her to know it—if she will consent to see me again if only for a little while. I want her near me, I want to persuade her to come home.”
“How do you know she is still in town?”
“I just think so—I sort of sense her presence. I saw her once, you know, just once about a week ago. She was entering a hotel, I ran after her but she was gone. The man at the desk threatened to have me arrested for creating a disturbance.”
Nash pushed a pencil and paper across the desk to him. “Write down her description—make it complete. The date you last saw her, the clothes she was wearing, the clothes she took with her when she moved out. How much money did she have; did she have a separate bank account? Can she drive a car; does she have one? The names of her friends, if any. The name of the beauty shop she patronized, the stores where she usually bought her clothes. Did she have a checking or charge account? Put it all down—everything you think of.”
Hodgkins held the pencil in a tight grasp, staring at Nash.
“What’s the matter?” Nash asked.
“There is one thing about her description . . .”
“What?”
“Her eyes are yellow—like yours.”
“Put it down,” Nash replied. He studied the scientist closely as the man bent over the pencil.
There was still something here that hadn’t come out. Still a vital and important something which lacked an answer. Perhaps Hodgkins himself wasn’t aware of it, couldn’t tell it. He seemed alert enough within the bounds of his own profession (making due allowances for the crippling security fetish) but he was woefully ignorant in other matters. The woman (and a hidden confederate, perhaps?) had skillfully trapped him into marriage and then patiently waited several years for the jackpot to pay off. Three weeks ago it had apparently paid off. She had traded on his gullibility and his lofty ambitions for the future; it wasn’t too fantastic to assume the woman knew or had learned of those ambitions and wanted desperately to be with him when they bore fruit—that , she might benefit personally from them.
The woman could have judged or gambled on what her husband might become in the future, and then deliberately placed herself in the position to know what comparatively few others would ever know. She gambled—in the sense that she could always abandon him if he failed and attach herself to another man who had not failed.
She had abandoned him now, not after failure but on the threshold of his success. Why?
Not because of his emotional breakdown. She herself had caused that, had caused his growing anxiety long weeks before the breakdown and the dismissal. Had she not given him cause to suspect she was leaving, not demonstrated in some way that she was breaking up their marriage, he would not have been sent home from his job—thus cutting off her supply of information. She was the direct cause. But why? And that long thirst for information, the continual prying in a field far outside the usual woman’s world—that was to be remarked. It revealed much of Carolyn Hodgkins. He didn’t need the man’s information that Carolyn Hodgkins too had yellow eyes. It was her search for information that revealed her to him. The thirst, and the method of obtaining it. Nash held a brief moment of genuine pity for Hodgkins. His very early years of marriage, during their “closeness,” must have been enjoyable in the extreme.
But there remained the enigmatic missing factor. Why had Carolyn Hodgkins coldly-abandoned a first-class information carrier? And long before his usefulness was over, reasonably long before his latest work could be put to a practical use? If he had finished that work some three weeks ago, the children of the Wac Corporal could not leap into space today or tomorrow.
Nash shook his head.
Hodgkins pushed the paper back across the desk. “I’m afraid that’s the best I can do. It is strange how few details of a woman’s dress you can remember—when you have to.”
“Good enough.” Nash studied the neat handwriting. “Did your wife have any hobbies? Collect anything, stamps, coins, anything? Bric-a-brac, maybe?”
“No, not that I recall. Oh, she did have a bull.” Hodgkins closed his eyes, picturing it.
“Bull?”
“A toy of some sort, I think. Stood about six inches high; I thought it was a china bull but it was made of some unbreakable material. She kept it in her bedroom. Do you mean to tell me you can make deductions from that?”
Nash shrugged. “You never know. People don’t abandon hobbies and habits when they change their lives. I wonder if I could drop out to the house some evening . . .? Look around, get the feel of the place? I might be able to find something you’d never think of.”
“Why—certainly. I’d be pleased to have you. You can find my number in the phone book.”
“Will do—soon. I’d like to talk to you in your own home; maybe the familiar surroundings will help to relieve your nervousness. And I may have something to report.”
“I’ve never done this sort of thing before, you know. My doctor . . . you seemed to be the only one I could confide in. I’m very glad you didn’t laugh at me.” A shadow crossed his face and he abruptly arose from the chair, shifting the straw hat from hand to hand. “Is there anything else, Mr. Nash?”
“No.” Nash put out his hand, clasped that of the still bewildered scientist. “Leave the rest to me. If she can be found, I’ll find her. If she can be persuaded to see you again, I’ll bring her or arrange a meeting place. If she refuses, I’ll deliver her answer with the reasons why.” He fought to hold his face still and his eyes expressionless.
“I can’t promise you what kind of a result I’ll get, but it will be a definite one. And in the meantime I’m going to give you the same advice that psychiatrist gave, but with a difference. Stay home and get some rest. Get Quietly drunk if you want to.” He broke the handclasp.
And then the physicist was gone, moving slowly and dreamily toward the door peeping cautiously out into the corridor before entering it himself. He forgot to close the door behind him, and Nash could hear his hesitant steps wandering toward the elevator.
Gilbert Nash shut the door quickly and leaned against it, staring down at his open palm. Beads of sweat stood out on the skin.
He realized that Hodgkins had no idea of what kind of ship was to use his power supply.
And he knew with certainty why Hodgkins’s wife had run out on him, three weeks before.
IV.
Dikty approached his base of operations and his morning routine with a cold pipe and still colder thoughts. He felt old and washed out. The morning was already cloudy and damp with promise of rain to come, and that served only to increase his irritation. His breakfast had been tasteless on his tongue, gulped down automatically and without appreciation, while innumerable cups of too-hot coffee had failed to was
h away the weariness within him. And his wife—He couldn’t remember when it had been necessary to apologize to his wife before, but he had done so this morning, halfway through the meal. He hadn’t realized he was talking so roughly, so thoughtlessly. And he might as well admit it—he was getting old for the job; he could no longer stay up all night and still feel human the next day. This was a job for younger men.
His was a second-floor office, consisting of two plain rooms tucked away at the back of the corridor. The solid, metal-sheathed door opening into the first room bore only a number, nothing else.
Shirley Hoffman waited behind her typewriter, doing nothing. She looked up brightly as he came in.
“Good morning, Mr. Dikty.”
“Don’t be so damned cheerful,” he retorted. “I’m not in the mood.”
Hoffman regarded him owlishly. “Little woman been beating you again?”
Dikty stopped. “I’m sorry. I was short tempered with my wife too, and that shouldn’t happen. Business is on the bad side this morning. I don’t like unpleasantness and I don’t like night work; these last seven or eight hours have given me a bellyful of both.” He removed the raincoat from across his arm and hung it up. “Lock the door and come in.”
Hoffman moved from behind her desk. “The telephone operator tells me that Washington has been calling. They will call again at nine thirty.” She snapped the lock on the metal-covered door.
Dikty glanced at his watch and absently studied the phone. “Cummings has my telegram, apparently. He doesn’t like it either.” He stalked across the room into the inner office, the girl trailing after him. Dikty seated himself and stared moodily through the window at the dullish sky, while the secretary poised pencil over pad and waited.
“Hoffman,” he said tiredly to the window and the sky beyond, “when you grow up, marry a dull and stolid man and have a happy life. Marry a painter or a plumber or a projectionist, I don’t care. But don’t be a career girl and above all, a career girl in our dirty racket!”
“Thank you, Mr. Dix.”
He moved slowly round to face her, scowling. “All right, do as you damned please! But I’m the kind of a man who says, I told you
“Rough, I gather?”
“Rough.” Dikty nodded and absently pulled his pipe from his pocket. “Rougher than hell on an old man like me.” He discovered the pipe in his hands, filled it and lit up. “This is for Cummings,” he said after a moment. “It concerns an Oak Ridge man plus the subject under previous discussion.” He pointed the pipestem at her notebook.
“Gregg Hodgkins, age forty-six, married, owning a home at 2334 North Shasta Drive. No children, no near relatives. Now—Until three weeks ago, Hodgkins was a competent and dependable nuclear physicist employed on a special and hurry-up project at Oak Ridge.” Dikty paused to collect a memory. “Hodgkins was working on Code four-four-seven, sharing co-responsibility for leadership on same. For some six or seven weeks prior to the particular date three weeks ago, Hodgkins exhibited growing signs of nervousness, mental fatigue and possibly instability. This was noted, but beyond a constant watch nothing was done about it, due to the fact that Code four-four-seven was rapidly nearing completion ahead of schedule and the stress was attributed to that. In addition, his co-leader and several of his fellow workers on the project all exhibited similar nervousness, leading the plant authorities to believe that all concerned were sharing the same anxiety over the coming ultimate success or failure of the experiment.
“Code four-four-seven was completed successfully and all men concerned with the thing reverted back to their normal selves with varying degrees of rapidity, except Hodgkins. He was then moved to a separate and harmless project and placed under continuous observation, but before plant authorities could do more he took matters into his own hands.
“He first visited his family doctor, Charles Barrett, 260 Weinburg Building. He told his doctor that he was experiencing domestic difficulties which had become rather acute in recent weeks, and attempted to fix the blame for said difficulties on his wife. He further stated that the wife was—or had recently become—more intelligent than he, and that this matter embittered him. The doctor assured him that he was a healthy man, physically and sent him to the plant psychiatrist.”
Dikty lifted the pipe to his mouth, discovered that the glow had died, and applied a second match.
“Montgomery, the psychiatrist, reports a similar story. Hodgkins visited him, told him of his difficulties at home and repeated the belief that his wife now outranked him in intelligence quotient. Hodgkins gave a long and involved recital of his aims, hopes and beliefs, chief among which was that as a young man he had wanted a smart and intelligent mate to help him reach his goals, and that he had deliberately and with study aforethought chosen this particular woman as being suitable to his purposes—or ideals. In recent years however he had become dissatisfied with their marriage because, as he put it, she apparently continued to gain intelligence at a rate exceeding his. This condition unnerved him, coupled to the strain connected with Code four-four-seven.
“Pending further study of the case, the psychiatrist sent him home and thereafter made periodic calls at the house to check up. Hodgkins’s mental condition became worse for reasons mentioned next below.
“His wife deserted him on the same day that he was sent home. Actual reason for separation not apparent to me, beyond those statements mentioned above. After two weeks of continued study, the psychiatrist prepared a recommendation that Hodgkins be permanently dismissed from government service—although that recommendation was not made known to him. In addition, the usual shadow was assigned to him to determine if he could hold his silence.
“Meanwhile the wife had moved into the May Hotel here; but moved out again several days later when she discovered that he had followed her and created a scene at the desk. The wife’s present location is unknown to me. She left no forwarding address and no discernible trail. I am of course concentrating on that angle in an attempt to locate her. Nothing more happened until yesterday.
“Early yesterday morning, Hodgkins left his home in a state of visible agitation and after wandering about the streets for many hours, called upon our subject—the subject under previous discussion and investigation. I am totally unable to discover what went on between them. The shadow reports that Hodgkins was closeted with subject for more than an hour, but that he could determine nothing of the conversation they held. In regards this failure, I decided to wire the subject’s office for sound and have taken steps to plant several microphones there. I regret that I did not do so earlier.
“As to Hodgkins’s visit to subject, I am unable to decide which of two reasons is the probable one. Fresh in mind is the McKeown case of some time back; Hodgkins may have decided to sell his information, but if this be true, how he became acquainted with our subject and what led him to believe the subject was interested in buying, I do not know. As mentioned in previous conversations, I have no knowledge or suspicion that subject is purchasing information.
“Unofficially, I am inclined to think that Hodgkins visited the subject for a second and rather obvious reason. Considering the subject’s advertised profession, Hodgkins’s recent separation from his wife and his subsequent failure to meet her again, only one fact prevents me from leaping to that rather obvious conclusion. The fact that the man is under our investigation, and that the coincidences involved are far too numerous and too startling. Are we to assume that this is but another one?”
Dikty turned slightly in his chair to waggle the pipestem at the girl. “And Hoffman, if you haven’t discovered by this time the identity of the subject we are discussing, you may as well kiss your career good-bye.” He studied her for a brief moment, the lines of weariness standing out on his face. “On the other hand, if you admit to being nosey and mention his name aloud, you can also kiss it good-bye.” He gave her a tired smile. “Now, do you want to marry the plumber?”
The girl returned the smile with spirit. “Not
just yet. I don’t plan to marry early.”
“That’s what I said, a long time ago. I met her at a square dance. And this morning I had to apologize to her for the first time in my life.” His eyes went back to the window and the threatening sky. “Well, suit yourself. You and I and the rest of us are involved in a game that is alternately boring and deadly. You’ll have to make your own decision. Let’s get back . . .
“After leaving the subject’s office in an apparently calmer state of mind, Hodgkins again wandered aimlessly through the streets for several hours and finally entered a secondhand shop where he attempted to purchase a revolver. The proprietor refused to sell him a weapon at that time, explaining that first he must obtain a police permit to carry a weapon. Hodgkins told the proprietor he would obtain one, and picked out a gun, asking the proprietor to lay it aside until he returned. The proprietor did so. Hodgkins then left the shop and did not return.
“He next visited a sporting goods store and again attempted to buy a revolver, again being told that first a permit was necessary before they could sell him the weapon. Hodgkins repeated the earlier procedure of choosing a gun and the store clerk set it aside for him. The shadow reports that both shopkeepers were in no way suspicious and that Hodgkins exhibited a calm, friendly manner at all times. (These men have learned to judge to some degree the type of person wanting hand weapons). After these two attempts Hodgkins purchased one copy of each of several newspapers available at a comer stand and retired to a small restaurant. He read them all thoroughly. The shadow states that it was quite apparent Hodgkins was searching for some particular item.
“He finally discarded the papers and took a taxi to his home, remaining there the rest of the day and evening.” Dikty paused to examine the ash in his pipe. “And I wish I could do the same.”
The Time Masters Page 5
